In 1870 Henry D. Wheatley noted that Elizabeth Montagu's coterie was
named "blue stockings" after the blue worsted stockings worn by the
naturalist Benjamin Stillingfleet.
Click images or captions to view pages
Portman Square: first home of the Elizabeth Montagu Bluestocking Salon Return
Jane Austen MUST camoflage her astute observations of how slavery of West
Indian Blacks is enslaving the absentee slave owners, their consequent
absentee wives, and their consequent orphaned children. Men that prefer
enslaved mistresses, often inebriated, earned income thrown to the winds.
Wives expected to be uneducated women that run after worthess lovers
(click to see)
while abandoning their children. Who is enslaved? However, Jane Austen must
be discrete as the Prime Minister (William Pitt the Younger) cannot see how
his secure government and its people have been undermined by Colonialism
and slavery, and are hollow people (he didn't learn that at Pembroke College).
However, educated and accomplished women (Bluestockings) were not accepted either,
no matter how accomplished in poetry, art, writers of literature, dramatists,
singers (men as castrati, sang women's roles), politically, as historians,
sculpters, etc. Women were to breed children, satisfy their husbands, show no
development of their minds (engage socially, but only in "proper", mindless
chatter).
There remains a troubling problem. Why were the Bluestockings so isolated
from political issues of the day? If Bluestockings are challenging the
social structure, then they are involved in revolutionary change. Do they
not see that other social problems also encroach upon revolutionary change
and followers might be ready allies? The question becomes how does one define
"political"? "Political" certainly can not mean an almost
meaningless "voting" or "sufferage" in a "representative Democracy" in which
opposing parties represent "Tweedle de vs Tweedle dum". Do the
Bluestockings only wish to be innvolved in meaningless nonsense: idle chatter?
What were some of the major political issues at that time, and how were the
Bluestockings involved in these issues?
Women's rights: work (legal equality with men, property, pay, property, etc.), children, sexuality.
Slavery and Abolitionism (are women also slaves, as are Black Africans?)
Opposition to Colonialism adventures.
Industrialization: iron and steel steam engines (1712) powered by coal:
iron mines, coal mines to power Yorkshire textile mills). Steam shipping
for coal, textiles, etc. Yorshire slavery, laws concerning labour and
child labour, poisons in environment from industrialization (Black Lung
disease, White Lung disease, Company towns, Company stores, laws against
combinatorial syndicates (unions), insurance industry, etc.
Science: Isaac Newton (1687), Copernicus/Heliocentrism (1543), Pasteur
(1821), Robert Koch theory of disease (1882), William Harvey Theory of
Blood Circulation (1628). Are women incapable of being Scientists?
Cities: food, clean water (Dr. Snow: 1854), communicable diseases
and Hospitals, modernization of prisons (1816), Public education (1889).
Transportation: trains (1825), roads and bridges, paddle-wheel
steamships (1838). The entire environment is being transformed!
Public Education: literacy, books, magazines, Journals: 1889.
Religion (propaganda: directing the thoughts of others),
Claude Adrien Helvétius, Enlightenment (the genocides
of Voltaire, John Locke), the racism of Immanuel Kant, other
modern, "progressive" ideologies.
The above political issues do amount to revolutionary social changes.
Certainly women's rights are extremely significant. Why could the
Bluestockings unite their just desires for women's rights to be united
with the rights required above? Can you think of reasons why women's
rights (Bluestockings) lost significance in society? Exactly what were
Jane Austen's interests in the forms of social change? We do know about
her exceeding interests in Regency Fashion, however. Lets examine a
little more.
"There is not one reference to Wollencraft in Austen's writings, either
in her fiction or correspondence. 1
However, Austen was familiar with the Wallstonecraft circle. 2
"Taking a firm stand in favour of the democratic and humanitarian
principles of the [French] Revolution, Wallstonecraft argued for
the rights of all people and denounced such abuses as the slave trade and
the economic domination of the landlord class. In championing the rights
of man she was working towards the position that she would take in
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Just as she believed that
men had inalienable rights, so did women; just as she opposed social
inequality, so did she oppose sexual inequality."
3
"... Austen's fiction takes a similar position to Wollstonecroft,
commenting unfavorably on girl's boarding schools, female accomplishments,
the triviality of female values, the female practice of coming out, the
legal position of women and the manifold abuses that were related to marriage."
4
"Throughout her novels she avoided politics, in compliance with the manners
of the time." 5
1
Roberts, Warren; "Jane Austen and the French Revolution", p. 156
2
Ibid., p. 156
3
Ibid., p. 156
4
Ibid., pp. 156, 157
5
Ibid., p. 158
Bibliography
Behn, Aphra; "Oroonoko"
Dashkova, Princess
(Мемуары
Княжны
Екатерины
Романовны
Воронцовой-Дашковой);
"The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova"
Eger, Elizabeth, Ed.; "Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830"
Website Terms of Use